During the last decade several Caribbean countries have focused much of their resources and energy on developing national curricula. Jamaica has been prominent among them with the Reform of Secondary Education (ROSE) project, which developed curricula first for five subjects, and later for four more subjects, among them music. More recently the development of a primary music curriculum and the piloting of a syllabus in music by the Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC) have added significantly to the number of innovations that school music faces.

Most teacher education programmes in the Caribbean and other parts of the world continue to face the challenge of training teachers who are often not equipped with the reading comprehension strategies necessary for the academic pursuits of preservice training. The majority of these strategies relate to metacomprehension, that is, awareness of, and control over, the requirements of "reading to learn” tasks.

 
A growing body of research exists on preservice teachers' experiences in reading methodology courses in North America (e.g., Allen and Piersma 1995; Hayden 1993/94). However, their counterparts in the Caribbean in general and Jamaica in particular have not enjoyed similar attention. Lack of local investment in research may be because children of wealthy Jamaicans usually attend the more prestigious private schools, generally from kindergarten through grade 12, then resort to countries of the North for their higher education (Goulbourne 1988. 

The University of the West Indies (UWI) was established 1948 as the University College of the West Indies (UCWI) to serve the then British colonies of Antigua and Barbuda, the Bahamas, Barbados, British Guy ana (now Guyana), British Honduras (now Belize), the British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Dominica, Grenada, Jamaica, Montserrat, St. Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Trinidad and Tobago.

This paper reviews the teacher development programmes and projects implemented in the Caribbean in the 1990s in light of the challenges faced by the countries of the region to reform their education systems. Particular attention is paid to innovations in teacher education and training, continuing professional development of teachers, teacher supervision, and teacher evaluation.

The call to integrate or incorporate technology education into the curriculum of primary schools in the Caribbean has continued over the past few years. Recently, the frequency of this call has been increasing as the influence and scope of the information and technology era unfold. Many Caribbean governments have recognized the importance of incorporating this aspect of education into the schools' curriculum and are constantly calling on educators and curriculum developers in the region to ensure that the schools' curricula are adjusted to reflect this important educational mandate.

This paper identifies and addresses potential conflicts in Jamaican lower primary school curriculum practices arising from a curriculum reform initiative of the Ministry of Education. This initiative involves revising the grades 1-3 primary curriculum from a subject-based to an integrated model in the second phase of a Primary Education Improvement Project (PEIP II), partially funded by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).

Standardized  intelligence tests have been severely criticized for their biases against minority students (Cucarro 1996; Midgette 1995; Wool folk 1998). It is also argued that intelligence testing is not fair to individuals living outside the culture for which a particular intelligence test has been normed (cf., Callahan and McIntyre 1994).

The Green Paper on Education prepared in 1999 by the Ministry of Education in Jamaica bears the title “Education: The Way Upward”, indicating perhaps the tremendous importance of education to the future development of the island. It attests that "it is the return on the investment in the building of human and social capital that represents our best hope for economic growth and social peace”.The first three papers in the Institute of Education Annual deal with aspects of primary education.

The age of information technology and interactivity is here and rapidly advancing, with significant developments in computer and communication technologies that are showing serious implications for instructional technology in general and teacher education in particular. It is natural and logical for professionals in the field of education, so inextricably linked to communication technology, to embrace the use of computer technology. However, there is no indication that teachers are in any enthusiastic haste to harness whatever potentials there may be in such technologies for teaching.